We dealt with some patent trolls back in the 2010-2020 era, for those who have not experienced it, it is absurd. In our case, the patent "troll" was an LLC w/ ~5 members - 2 lawyers, 1 person who owned the original patent, and some spouses. The only "asset" of the LLC was the patent. I think it was around scrollbars or some CSS overflow thing - they sent us a demand/cease-desist letter saying they will sue for $1M and asked for a call. Classic Lawyer call "well, we can make this all go away for $25k." We ended up fighting it a bit because of "principles" by our founder. - in discovery there was something like 1,000 of these exact demand letters they had sent.
The kicker? If you fight back, it costs a ton in legal fees, and even if you win, you can’t recover those fees — because the LLC’s only asset is the patent itself.
Just insane to me we would take a step back like this.
See Blue Jeans Cable's classic response to a patent cease-and-desist letter from Monster Cables: The Blue Jeans Cable CEO was a former litigator who pulled no punches in his response. [0]
> Let me begin by stating, without equivocation, that I have no interest in infringing upon any intellectual property belonging to Monster Cable. Indeed, the less my customers think my products resemble Monster's, in form or function, the better.
> Similarly, as I note further below, you omit reference to another patent Monster has held which appears, frankly to be fatal to your position. If you expect to persuade me, you had better start making full, open and honest disclosures
> It looks like when you sent this letter, you were operating on the premise that I am not smart enough to see through your deceptions or sophisticated enough to intelligently evaluate your claims; shame on you.
> You are welcome to point out any errors in my reasoning; but I have to say that I will be unreservedly surprised if you are successful in doing so.
> It may be that my inability to see the pragmatic value of settling frivolous claims is a deep character flaw
Because they don't expect to win the lawsuit. Their odds of winning a lawsuit aren't that good, so their goal is to badger a founder into settling. A founder would likely be killing their creative endeavor to become their own lawyer and go to court for themselves, and the trolls choose targets for whom paying a lawyer for the length of one of these trials would be prohibitively costly.
In other words, their real business model, the reason that they can be considered a "safe investment" is that they operate as an extortion racket at scale with the justice system itself as their (free) muscle.
You can buy IP insurance; the problem is that the proposed strategy only works against patent trolls. If you infringed a legitimate patent the insurer would be screwed, so they'd want to do an enormous (impossible?) amount of due diligence before writing the policy. As with most other insurance policies, insurers in practice are only willing to take on a portion of the risk.
Couldn't some innovative insurance company create a policy that adds a clause like "policy kicks in if the litigant fits the criteria of a patent troll (as described above, lacking any assets besides the patent or a few patents that don't pass initial muster as legitimate, or has fewer than two physical locations with at least 4 non executive employees). Even saying something like "if the litigant has no health insurance for their employees" would actually easily preclude patent trolls as you'd have to be an actual decently sized company to be able to negotiate real health insurance for your employees.
Adverse selection would be a big issue, but actually perhaps if the indemnity only covers defense, an insurer would be willing to take more risk (and have expertise in batting away these claims.)
I have no experience with this, and the only time I've gone and tried to get quoted for things like cyber liability, etc, the costs are incredible relative to the value of the business and revenues.
The defense to this is multiple LLCs and licensing schemes. Just like the troll, don't hold any assets in the vulnerable LLC. If Walmart sells a bootleg shirt the IP holder can't sue the company that cleans the parking lot.
Not really. It's worth it and very effective for business with significant liability risks. The corporate structure of a basic gym will have like 6 entities if it's done properly.
I probably should have just written "counter" or "fight back". I was rushing out the office door when I pushed the reply button.
In some countries you can sue for "unjustifiable threats to begin patent infringement proceedings", but I was also thinking things like filing complaints with the relevant Bar associations. That sort of thing.
> We ended up fighting it a bit because of "principles" by our founder. - in discovery there was something like 1,000 of these exact demand letters they had sent.
I am noting you have not said how this ended up. What does 'we ended up fighting it a bit because of "principles" of our founder.
It means they pushed back then settled without any useful resolution. The troll didn't get a big payday, but they didn't get told to stop and it set precedent helping them shake down others.
Many times the lawyers involved have private practices or work at a firm that handles other, non-patent-trolling, cases. If word gets out that the firm's members are moonlighting as patent troll facilitators, it could impact their business.
If legal consequences aren't a possible avenue to prevent unacceptable behaviour from someone then a viable alternative is to make that person a pariah.
The more people know that someone is doing unscrupulous things the more people can choose to not do business with that person or interact with them in a friendly matter.
Ideally this would lead to a scenario where they lose the means to continue to do unacceptable things and they would be forced to stop.
The point here is that a patent troll isn't really a "business." There would be no real reason to work with the patent troll outside of the extortion they're using the patent for. Given the options for engagement are "settle or be sued," a friendly approach was never really an option.
Given these parameters, how would making them a pariah change the functioning of the business?
They have lives outside of their way of making money.
They have friends, family, a community that they belong to.
Affecting their relationship with those things hurts them.
I'm kind of confused why 'name and shame' requires such an in-depth explanation. Patent trolls arent the first kind of social parasite to exist and their parasitism doesn't render them immune to all forms of pressure.
Social pressure is often one of the most effective ways of pressuring someone.
It's for sure scummy, but from what I've read about patent trolls, usually they get to continue until they eventually run into someone principled (and bankrolled) and then they lose their patent due to prior art in many cases.
I've never heard of them getting in actual trouble.
How come you can sue others and the court doesn't check whether you have the funds if you lose? I mean if you don't have funds allocated away in case you lose, then why start the proceedings?
> seemingly it always favor either powerful or wealthy individuals
Reality is in favor of the powerful and wealthy. It's practically a tautological statement that powerful people are more powerful than those who are not.
Poor people do have the option of seeking pro bono, contingency (lawyers paid from winnings or settlements), or other means, but they will still not have things like daycare / nanny for children, free time (still need to work to pay bills while trial is pending), prepared meals, staff to handle shopping / laundry / cleaning, or a billion other things that make the stress of going through the court system easier to bear.
You could probably say goodbye to pro bono or contingency work if you also had to prove you have the money to pay legal fees before you could go to court.
Might as well buy a lottery ticket hoping to win enough money to fund your own case rather than cling to the faint hope of finding a pro bono attorney or even one working on contingency. My bitter experience stems directly from my father’s death, caused by gross, willful negligence at the hands of those entrusted with his care. Despite a formal DHHS investigation, which unequivocally substantiated my claims, and over 300 hours of undeniable audio, video, and documented proof illustrating the horrifying ordeal he endured, no one stepped forward to help. Justice wasn’t served, not in this life, nor, it seems, in any other.
It’s not that lawyers told me there wasn’t a case. Instead, they said it was “too complicated.” One attorney spent a week supposedly weighing my meticulously prepared case, only to dismiss it with a curt email: “Regrettably, we have too many other cases to manage additional workloads at this time.” After that, my emails went unanswered, my pleas seemingly silenced by convenience.
Apparently, lawyers today prefer the ripest, lowest hanging fruit, the easy cases promising easy profits. In our society, drowning in incompetence, there’s no shortage of simpler, safer bets. Yet, you’d think there would still be at least a few brave souls seeking justice, not only easy money, who would choose righteousness over profit, integrity over convenience. But I learned the hard way that righteousness rarely outweighs the bottom line.
I handed them an almost complete case, indexed, transcribed, painstakingly timestamped. They didn’t even bother to read it. Beyond the injustice, what wounds me most deeply is the realization that my father’s profound decency, the quiet dignity and unwavering ethics that defined his life, ultimately meant nothing in a system indifferent to such virtues. His goodness didn’t offer him protection or redemption in death. Perhaps it was naive to believe that it ever could.
This realization doesn’t just hurt, it isolates, minimizes, and disillusions. It deepens the bitterness of loss. Forgive me for venting my frustration this way, but it’s all I have left.
I’m sorry, Dad. I truly tried. Turns out, you were right about lawyers, too. I’m writing this with just a few weeks remaining in the statute of limitations. It doesn’t have to be like this, but all indications are that decency simply costs too much for those in power.
> Reality is in favor of the powerful and wealthy. It's practically a tautological statement that powerful people are more powerful than those who are not.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
I think like so many things the idea of 'patent trolls' has taken on a meaning whereby anyone who has a patent but no operating actual company (as you are describing LLC with 5 members and a lawyer) everyone automatically thinks 'sham'.
On the surface by stories related that certainly appears to be the case.
However we don't have any data (only anecdotes) on how many patents are pursued this way that are actually valid. And 'back in the old days' it used to be that you could have an actual patent and then get shafted by some large corporation simply because they could afford lawyers and you couldn't (meaning 'mr small inventor')
What I am saying in no way means I don't think there is probably abuse (there are enough anecdotes to think 'something is wrong here') but really we need the entire picture and dataset to decide that (in all fairness).
It's not really a question of whether the patent troll has a legitimate patent or not—in the sense of having clear ownership over the IP, that is. They generally do. We consider someone a patent troll when they don't make use of the patent themselves, except to extract money from other people, typically through threats of legal action. They're exploiting the fear of being sued for a lot of money in order to get a comparatively small amount of money in exchange for agreeing to not sue. "Troll" here is in the pre-internet sense of the word, not someone making up a fake story on a message board, but more like a troll living under a bridge, demanding money from people in order to cross it.
Trolls often have clear title to a patent that covers something. Many of these patents should not have been granted, but they were. If you fight them to the end, you can often get the patent invalidated, but the trolls are smart enough to settle before that happens.
But they generally don't have a patent that covers anything real. Even ignoring the situations where the patent is indefensible through defects in process or due to prior art, the claims in these patents often don't actually read against the businesses being sued.
The problem is that it takes tens of thousands of dollars per patent to get an opinion from your own lawyers about whether the patents bear on your products or processes and you pretty much have to do that even if you never go to court.
> when they don't make use of the patent themselves, except to extract money from other people, typically through threats of legal action.
If someone has (what you have called) 'a legitimate patent' then they have the right (whether they use the patent or not) to then pursue legal action to either stop use of the patent or to settle for money damages.
What companies don't like is someone coming along with the ability to engage legal help that they wouldn't be able to do with out the attorneys that are handling this (to gain a payoff for themselves which well attorneys do for other things).
However while this seems different than similar things that happen (with actual companies with legal resources) it's really just the same thing just by different parties.
If let's say General Electric has a patent on something and you use that patent GE can come after you (and probably will). Same as with large companies defending their IP (trademarks).
I feel like you're discussing this from a legal perspective, when it's really more of a moral (not the right word but the general concept is fine) one.
"GE defending a patent they use in their products" and "an LLC with one patent as an asset and no real business outside of defending said patent" are two entirely different situations, even if legally they're the "same."
The policymaking with regards to industry is functioning more like a clearinghouse, where every interest group gets to have their targeted policy, than a coalition, where the event that one interest group's target policy would hamstring another member would result in dealmaking and some sort of compromise. Certain industries like the steel industry receive steeply protectionist trade restraints, but they're also being de-prioritized in favor of non-producing vexatious litigators who stop them from innovating. In essence this is similar to how some industries are seeing major policy-driven price increases on their outputs and inputs. Multiply that by every lobby and that's all I can interpret out of the big picture.
> Congress Created IPR to Protect the Public—Not Just Patent Owners
For this administration, this is a problem to be solved. Big business are the masters now and we need to make it easier for them to step on small business by any means.
Big business isn't really monolithic when it comes to patents. Some large tech companies love patents (MSFT, e.g.), while others (Google, e.g.) seem to abhor them.
Also, the troll problem is a problem for big business, not a benefit to big business.
Patent trolls benefit from it being expensive and time-consuming to challenge patents (and defend yourself from infringement claims)
These regulations are actually beneficial to big business. It makes it significantly easier to defend your own patents and sue anybody that infringes on them.
I imagine that these benefits are much bigger than the downside of dealing with patent trolls.
Asking someone who knows history better than I do:
Is it the case that every time a society has developed extreme wealth concentration, that concentration gets diffused only via violence? E.g., by internal revolution or by takeover by another country?
I agree. You can, however, make a case that that time period was revolutionary - i.e. that power relationships were transformed - though without (much, at least widespread) violence.
That's certainly the argument made by those within American society who want to undo the legislation and institutions by which those changes came about.
It's always been this way. The "rags-to-riches" stories are fabrications to keep the average worker thinking they have a chance. You have a better chance of winning the lottery, which coincidentally, is another psyop to keep people believing that they have a chance.
You are off by several orders of magnitude - a person starting in wealth quintile 1 (numbered poorest to richest) has an ~18% chance to reach quintile 4 or 5, and starting from quintile 2, that rises to 25%.
Well I think that the PSID, which supplies the data for that paper/article, is fundamentally flawed and the potential error margin is too huge for it to be taken seriously.
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is the longest running longitudinal household survey in the world
The study began in 1968 with a nationally representative sample of over 18,000 individuals living in 5,000 families in the United States. Information on these individuals and their descendants has been collected continuously, including data covering employment, income, wealth, expenditures, health, marriage, childbearing, child development, philanthropy, education, and numerous other topics. Over 7,600 peer-reviewed publications have been based on the PSID.
How flawed do you think it is and why? What is the potential error margin? 20%? 200%? 1000%?
And if this data is flawed, which alternative, better data did you base your statement on? The one about wealth mobility being largely a myth.
Have you heard the story about the inebriated man looking for his wallet under a streetlight? I don't think using a metric I believe to be flawed, simply because I can't find a better metric, is a good idea. I'd rather accept that it's still a realm of speculation and opinion.
I think systems grow by themselves - more like a biological ecosystem. Even powerful politicians seem to often be reduced to dealing with the outcomes of a system without seeming to understand how that system works. The idea that people are in charge leads to conspiratorial theories: imagined incentives of people behind the scenes.
However I know I look at the world differently from most people: so it is just as likely my own views are warped.
We must get rid of the patent system. It is solely a way to grant monopolies to those who do not deserve them and slow down all human progress. Henry Ford said the gas engine was delayed twenty years by a frivolous patent.
IPR is a tool that weakens all patents. Saying it helps trolls at the expense of everyone else (which this article says) is a bad faith argument. Weakening IPR helps all patent holders fight for their rights, including trolls. Considering how the tech industry has bullied its way past numerous rightful patents, this seems like it could be reasonable or might not be.
If you think we should have no patents be my guest, but this helps non troll patent holders and not just trolls.
Defensive patents don't really help against trolls since they don't actually make products. That means that they don't infringe on any patents and thus your defensive portfolio doesn't get to play.
We should have notarized LLM models for this. Timestamp your LLMs, put them in a notarized database. Then, if you en up in a patent lawsuit, just fire up the relevant LLM, and ask it in simple terms to reproduce troll's claims.
For what purpose? If it's for prior art, the prior at must have been publicly available, so a private LLM wouldn't work. Perhaps I'm missing your point, though.
I think the idea is that if an LLM trained prior to the patent date can reproduce the invention, then either the idea is obvious or there was prior art in the training set; either way the patent is invalid.
> ...if an LLM trained prior to the patent date can reproduce the invention...
Would we even be able to tell if the machine reproduced the invention covered by the claims in the patent?
I (regrettably) have my name on some US software patents. I've read the patents, have intimate knowledge of the software they claim to cover, and see nearly zero relation between the patent and the covered software. If I set a skilled programmer to the task of reproducing the software components that are supposed to be covered by the patents, I guarantee that they'd fail, and fail hard.
Back before I knew about the whole "treble damage thing" (and just how terrible many-to-most software patents are) I read many software patents. I found them to offer no hints to the programmer seeking to reproduce the covered software component or system.
Indeed, but a constructive reduction to practice means that the inventor still has to describe how it can be done. And if it's impossible, then it's not a reduction to practice, just an invalid patent.
I had similar thoughts before. It's worth thinking about what attorneys will do in response to rejections based on LLMs reproducing ideas. I'm a former patent examiner, and attorneys frequently argue that the examiners showed "hindsight bias" when rejecting claims. The LLM needs to produce the idea without being led too much towards it.
Something like clean-room reverse engineering could be applied. First ask a LLM to describe the problem in a way that avoids disclosing the solution, then ask an independent LLM how that problem could be solved. If LLMs can reliably produce the idea in response to the problem description, that is, after running a LLM 100 times over half show the idea (the fraction here is made up for illustration), the idea's obvious.
We dealt with some patent trolls back in the 2010-2020 era, for those who have not experienced it, it is absurd. In our case, the patent "troll" was an LLC w/ ~5 members - 2 lawyers, 1 person who owned the original patent, and some spouses. The only "asset" of the LLC was the patent. I think it was around scrollbars or some CSS overflow thing - they sent us a demand/cease-desist letter saying they will sue for $1M and asked for a call. Classic Lawyer call "well, we can make this all go away for $25k." We ended up fighting it a bit because of "principles" by our founder. - in discovery there was something like 1,000 of these exact demand letters they had sent.
The kicker? If you fight back, it costs a ton in legal fees, and even if you win, you can’t recover those fees — because the LLC’s only asset is the patent itself.
Just insane to me we would take a step back like this.
See Blue Jeans Cable's classic response to a patent cease-and-desist letter from Monster Cables: The Blue Jeans Cable CEO was a former litigator who pulled no punches in his response. [0]
[0] See https://www.oncontracts.com/monster-cables-picked-the-wrong-... (self-cite).
> Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.
Sumptuous!
The original (https://www.bluejeanscable.com/legal/mcp/response041408.pdf) has so much more. It is truly a work of art:
> RE: Your letter, received April Fools' Day
> Let me begin by stating, without equivocation, that I have no interest in infringing upon any intellectual property belonging to Monster Cable. Indeed, the less my customers think my products resemble Monster's, in form or function, the better.
> Similarly, as I note further below, you omit reference to another patent Monster has held which appears, frankly to be fatal to your position. If you expect to persuade me, you had better start making full, open and honest disclosures
> It looks like when you sent this letter, you were operating on the premise that I am not smart enough to see through your deceptions or sophisticated enough to intelligently evaluate your claims; shame on you.
> You are welcome to point out any errors in my reasoning; but I have to say that I will be unreservedly surprised if you are successful in doing so.
> It may be that my inability to see the pragmatic value of settling frivolous claims is a deep character flaw
I get an adrenaline rush just reading it
Patrick... you're sweating
This man is my hero. What an absolute legend
Doesn't it cost a lot in legal fee to the troll too? How are they able to finance it given that they are basically a sham company?
Because they don't expect to win the lawsuit. Their odds of winning a lawsuit aren't that good, so their goal is to badger a founder into settling. A founder would likely be killing their creative endeavor to become their own lawyer and go to court for themselves, and the trolls choose targets for whom paying a lawyer for the length of one of these trials would be prohibitively costly.
In other words, their real business model, the reason that they can be considered a "safe investment" is that they operate as an extortion racket at scale with the justice system itself as their (free) muscle.
How's this?
1. You buy "litigation insurance."
2. You state that you are insured on your website.
3. The insurance company is required to defend in all patent cases that arise, so there is no doubt that you will be represented in court.
4. Nobody sues.
5. The insurance company makes a profit with no cost or risk.
You can buy IP insurance; the problem is that the proposed strategy only works against patent trolls. If you infringed a legitimate patent the insurer would be screwed, so they'd want to do an enormous (impossible?) amount of due diligence before writing the policy. As with most other insurance policies, insurers in practice are only willing to take on a portion of the risk.
Couldn't some innovative insurance company create a policy that adds a clause like "policy kicks in if the litigant fits the criteria of a patent troll (as described above, lacking any assets besides the patent or a few patents that don't pass initial muster as legitimate, or has fewer than two physical locations with at least 4 non executive employees). Even saying something like "if the litigant has no health insurance for their employees" would actually easily preclude patent trolls as you'd have to be an actual decently sized company to be able to negotiate real health insurance for your employees.
The only issue is misalignment of incentives.
A patent troll will take a look at such a policy and do the bare minimum to give off the appearance of a ‘real’ company.
And then the insurance company will simply go “yep, that tracks”, with little incentive to investigate as it’s not in their best interest.
Adverse selection would be a big issue, but actually perhaps if the indemnity only covers defense, an insurer would be willing to take more risk (and have expertise in batting away these claims.)
Is this a real thing for small companies?
I have no experience with this, and the only time I've gone and tried to get quoted for things like cyber liability, etc, the costs are incredible relative to the value of the business and revenues.
The defense to this is multiple LLCs and licensing schemes. Just like the troll, don't hold any assets in the vulnerable LLC. If Walmart sells a bootleg shirt the IP holder can't sue the company that cleans the parking lot.
That is a lot of effort, and expensive
Probably ineffective too, as some part of your firm must hold the assets, and that's the part that gets sued
Not really. It's worth it and very effective for business with significant liability risks. The corporate structure of a basic gym will have like 6 entities if it's done properly.
It's like spam.
Send out 1,000s of dubious demand letters which don't cost much. Some percent of those will settle with minimal effort on the troll's side. Profit.
Drop the ones that look expensive and hope they don't counter sue.
What would they counter sue for?
I probably should have just written "counter" or "fight back". I was rushing out the office door when I pushed the reply button.
In some countries you can sue for "unjustifiable threats to begin patent infringement proceedings", but I was also thinking things like filing complaints with the relevant Bar associations. That sort of thing.
The troll is lawyers, so it only costs their own time.
Their time is worth more than the $25K they want.
> We ended up fighting it a bit because of "principles" by our founder. - in discovery there was something like 1,000 of these exact demand letters they had sent.
I am noting you have not said how this ended up. What does 'we ended up fighting it a bit because of "principles" of our founder.
It means they pushed back then settled without any useful resolution. The troll didn't get a big payday, but they didn't get told to stop and it set precedent helping them shake down others.
I just enjoyed another story about fighting similar legal shenanigans higher up on the HN front page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43442178
The correct course of action in situations like this is to name and shame.
How does that help? A patent troll doesn't really have any reputation to protect.
Many times the lawyers involved have private practices or work at a firm that handles other, non-patent-trolling, cases. If word gets out that the firm's members are moonlighting as patent troll facilitators, it could impact their business.
If legal consequences aren't a possible avenue to prevent unacceptable behaviour from someone then a viable alternative is to make that person a pariah.
The more people know that someone is doing unscrupulous things the more people can choose to not do business with that person or interact with them in a friendly matter.
Ideally this would lead to a scenario where they lose the means to continue to do unacceptable things and they would be forced to stop.
The point here is that a patent troll isn't really a "business." There would be no real reason to work with the patent troll outside of the extortion they're using the patent for. Given the options for engagement are "settle or be sued," a friendly approach was never really an option.
Given these parameters, how would making them a pariah change the functioning of the business?
They have lives outside of their way of making money.
They have friends, family, a community that they belong to.
Affecting their relationship with those things hurts them.
I'm kind of confused why 'name and shame' requires such an in-depth explanation. Patent trolls arent the first kind of social parasite to exist and their parasitism doesn't render them immune to all forms of pressure.
Social pressure is often one of the most effective ways of pressuring someone.
Would the bar association in the lawyer’s state be interested?
Other than to commend the entrepreneurial sprit of its members?
Why, is it illegal?
It's for sure scummy, but from what I've read about patent trolls, usually they get to continue until they eventually run into someone principled (and bankrolled) and then they lose their patent due to prior art in many cases.
I've never heard of them getting in actual trouble.
[dead]
How come you can sue others and the court doesn't check whether you have the funds if you lose? I mean if you don't have funds allocated away in case you lose, then why start the proceedings?
Because it's generally considered bad policy to make it illegal for poor people to sue.
Yeah, that's trivial. But law has so many edge cases and seemingly it always favor either powerful or wealthy individuals.
Plus, poor people cannot afford the litigation costs...
[Written laws] were just like spiders' webs; they would hold the weak and delicate... but would be torn to pieces by the rich and powerful
- Plutarch
> seemingly it always favor either powerful or wealthy individuals
Reality is in favor of the powerful and wealthy. It's practically a tautological statement that powerful people are more powerful than those who are not.
Poor people do have the option of seeking pro bono, contingency (lawyers paid from winnings or settlements), or other means, but they will still not have things like daycare / nanny for children, free time (still need to work to pay bills while trial is pending), prepared meals, staff to handle shopping / laundry / cleaning, or a billion other things that make the stress of going through the court system easier to bear.
You could probably say goodbye to pro bono or contingency work if you also had to prove you have the money to pay legal fees before you could go to court.
Might as well buy a lottery ticket hoping to win enough money to fund your own case rather than cling to the faint hope of finding a pro bono attorney or even one working on contingency. My bitter experience stems directly from my father’s death, caused by gross, willful negligence at the hands of those entrusted with his care. Despite a formal DHHS investigation, which unequivocally substantiated my claims, and over 300 hours of undeniable audio, video, and documented proof illustrating the horrifying ordeal he endured, no one stepped forward to help. Justice wasn’t served, not in this life, nor, it seems, in any other.
It’s not that lawyers told me there wasn’t a case. Instead, they said it was “too complicated.” One attorney spent a week supposedly weighing my meticulously prepared case, only to dismiss it with a curt email: “Regrettably, we have too many other cases to manage additional workloads at this time.” After that, my emails went unanswered, my pleas seemingly silenced by convenience.
Apparently, lawyers today prefer the ripest, lowest hanging fruit, the easy cases promising easy profits. In our society, drowning in incompetence, there’s no shortage of simpler, safer bets. Yet, you’d think there would still be at least a few brave souls seeking justice, not only easy money, who would choose righteousness over profit, integrity over convenience. But I learned the hard way that righteousness rarely outweighs the bottom line.
I handed them an almost complete case, indexed, transcribed, painstakingly timestamped. They didn’t even bother to read it. Beyond the injustice, what wounds me most deeply is the realization that my father’s profound decency, the quiet dignity and unwavering ethics that defined his life, ultimately meant nothing in a system indifferent to such virtues. His goodness didn’t offer him protection or redemption in death. Perhaps it was naive to believe that it ever could.
This realization doesn’t just hurt, it isolates, minimizes, and disillusions. It deepens the bitterness of loss. Forgive me for venting my frustration this way, but it’s all I have left.
I’m sorry, Dad. I truly tried. Turns out, you were right about lawyers, too. I’m writing this with just a few weeks remaining in the statute of limitations. It doesn’t have to be like this, but all indications are that decency simply costs too much for those in power.
> Reality is in favor of the powerful and wealthy. It's practically a tautological statement that powerful people are more powerful than those who are not.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
-- Anatole France
Because solving the answer to what is the correct legal interpretation is not concerned with if that interpretation yields economic identities.
I think like so many things the idea of 'patent trolls' has taken on a meaning whereby anyone who has a patent but no operating actual company (as you are describing LLC with 5 members and a lawyer) everyone automatically thinks 'sham'.
On the surface by stories related that certainly appears to be the case.
However we don't have any data (only anecdotes) on how many patents are pursued this way that are actually valid. And 'back in the old days' it used to be that you could have an actual patent and then get shafted by some large corporation simply because they could afford lawyers and you couldn't (meaning 'mr small inventor')
What I am saying in no way means I don't think there is probably abuse (there are enough anecdotes to think 'something is wrong here') but really we need the entire picture and dataset to decide that (in all fairness).
It's not really a question of whether the patent troll has a legitimate patent or not—in the sense of having clear ownership over the IP, that is. They generally do. We consider someone a patent troll when they don't make use of the patent themselves, except to extract money from other people, typically through threats of legal action. They're exploiting the fear of being sued for a lot of money in order to get a comparatively small amount of money in exchange for agreeing to not sue. "Troll" here is in the pre-internet sense of the word, not someone making up a fake story on a message board, but more like a troll living under a bridge, demanding money from people in order to cross it.
Trolls often have clear title to a patent that covers something. Many of these patents should not have been granted, but they were. If you fight them to the end, you can often get the patent invalidated, but the trolls are smart enough to settle before that happens.
But they generally don't have a patent that covers anything real. Even ignoring the situations where the patent is indefensible through defects in process or due to prior art, the claims in these patents often don't actually read against the businesses being sued.
The problem is that it takes tens of thousands of dollars per patent to get an opinion from your own lawyers about whether the patents bear on your products or processes and you pretty much have to do that even if you never go to court.
> when they don't make use of the patent themselves, except to extract money from other people, typically through threats of legal action.
If someone has (what you have called) 'a legitimate patent' then they have the right (whether they use the patent or not) to then pursue legal action to either stop use of the patent or to settle for money damages.
What companies don't like is someone coming along with the ability to engage legal help that they wouldn't be able to do with out the attorneys that are handling this (to gain a payoff for themselves which well attorneys do for other things).
However while this seems different than similar things that happen (with actual companies with legal resources) it's really just the same thing just by different parties.
If let's say General Electric has a patent on something and you use that patent GE can come after you (and probably will). Same as with large companies defending their IP (trademarks).
I feel like you're discussing this from a legal perspective, when it's really more of a moral (not the right word but the general concept is fine) one.
"GE defending a patent they use in their products" and "an LLC with one patent as an asset and no real business outside of defending said patent" are two entirely different situations, even if legally they're the "same."
The policymaking with regards to industry is functioning more like a clearinghouse, where every interest group gets to have their targeted policy, than a coalition, where the event that one interest group's target policy would hamstring another member would result in dealmaking and some sort of compromise. Certain industries like the steel industry receive steeply protectionist trade restraints, but they're also being de-prioritized in favor of non-producing vexatious litigators who stop them from innovating. In essence this is similar to how some industries are seeing major policy-driven price increases on their outputs and inputs. Multiply that by every lobby and that's all I can interpret out of the big picture.
> Congress Created IPR to Protect the Public—Not Just Patent Owners
For this administration, this is a problem to be solved. Big business are the masters now and we need to make it easier for them to step on small business by any means.
Big business isn't really monolithic when it comes to patents. Some large tech companies love patents (MSFT, e.g.), while others (Google, e.g.) seem to abhor them.
Also, the troll problem is a problem for big business, not a benefit to big business.
Patent trolls benefit from it being expensive and time-consuming to challenge patents (and defend yourself from infringement claims)
These regulations are actually beneficial to big business. It makes it significantly easier to defend your own patents and sue anybody that infringes on them.
I imagine that these benefits are much bigger than the downside of dealing with patent trolls.
Tech companies aren't the only big businesses in the US.
Are tech companies really the ones lobbying hardest for policy changes? I suspect other industries are the ones pushing harder with fallout for tech.
Why do we keep moving toward a system where being ahead is the most viable way to get ahead?
Power accumulates the same way rivers flow into the ocean
If there is no continuous effort to tax rich people and split up political power, democracy will fall back into feudalism
Asking someone who knows history better than I do:
Is it the case that every time a society has developed extreme wealth concentration, that concentration gets diffused only via violence? E.g., by internal revolution or by takeover by another country?
the US Gilded Age into the Great Depression, Labor Movement, and New Deal appears to be a counterexample.
I agree. You can, however, make a case that that time period was revolutionary - i.e. that power relationships were transformed - though without (much, at least widespread) violence.
That's certainly the argument made by those within American society who want to undo the legislation and institutions by which those changes came about.
"While" not "if"
It's always been this way. The "rags-to-riches" stories are fabrications to keep the average worker thinking they have a chance. You have a better chance of winning the lottery, which coincidentally, is another psyop to keep people believing that they have a chance.
> You have a better chance of winning the lottery
You are off by several orders of magnitude - a person starting in wealth quintile 1 (numbered poorest to richest) has an ~18% chance to reach quintile 4 or 5, and starting from quintile 2, that rises to 25%.
Source: Figure 1, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/stuck-on-the-ladder-wealt...
Well I think that the PSID, which supplies the data for that paper/article, is fundamentally flawed and the potential error margin is too huge for it to be taken seriously.
This PSID? https://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is the longest running longitudinal household survey in the world
The study began in 1968 with a nationally representative sample of over 18,000 individuals living in 5,000 families in the United States. Information on these individuals and their descendants has been collected continuously, including data covering employment, income, wealth, expenditures, health, marriage, childbearing, child development, philanthropy, education, and numerous other topics. Over 7,600 peer-reviewed publications have been based on the PSID.
How flawed do you think it is and why? What is the potential error margin? 20%? 200%? 1000%?
And if this data is flawed, which alternative, better data did you base your statement on? The one about wealth mobility being largely a myth.
Have you heard the story about the inebriated man looking for his wallet under a streetlight? I don't think using a metric I believe to be flawed, simply because I can't find a better metric, is a good idea. I'd rather accept that it's still a realm of speculation and opinion.
Because of the golden rule.
The people with all the gold make all the rules.
Because "we" don't have a functioning democracy. Only the illusion of one.
Because money controls things
I think systems grow by themselves - more like a biological ecosystem. Even powerful politicians seem to often be reduced to dealing with the outcomes of a system without seeming to understand how that system works. The idea that people are in charge leads to conspiratorial theories: imagined incentives of people behind the scenes.
However I know I look at the world differently from most people: so it is just as likely my own views are warped.
because r > g
Not sure what that is but it's more like the Lotka-Volterra equations (predator–prey model).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equat...
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce... for an explanation of r > g.
We must get rid of the patent system. It is solely a way to grant monopolies to those who do not deserve them and slow down all human progress. Henry Ford said the gas engine was delayed twenty years by a frivolous patent.
Has the new administration replaced the leadership at the USPTO yet?
What makes you think this is something the new administration would take issue with?
Did I indicate that's what I think? My question was quite fair.
IPR is a tool that weakens all patents. Saying it helps trolls at the expense of everyone else (which this article says) is a bad faith argument. Weakening IPR helps all patent holders fight for their rights, including trolls. Considering how the tech industry has bullied its way past numerous rightful patents, this seems like it could be reasonable or might not be.
If you think we should have no patents be my guest, but this helps non troll patent holders and not just trolls.
(Inactive) patent litigator here (been doing other things for some years now): IPRs are way better than jury trials for determining patentability.
The USPTO is limiting IPR, not the other way around.
Maybe it's time for a patent pool for non-trolls covering patent to behavior.
Defensive patent pools exist, if that's what you're saying: Unified Patents, LOT network, and RPX are a few.
Defensive patents don't really help against trolls since they don't actually make products. That means that they don't infringe on any patents and thus your defensive portfolio doesn't get to play.
I'm confused. Do you mean a patent that patents 'patent trolling'?
Way too much prior art, no?
And we want people using the patents, so you'd have to actively troll...
Yes.
I can't parse this sentence. I even tried reading out loud. I thought maybe to=troll but still I can't understand it.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20080270152
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070244837
USPTO is the U.S. Patent Troll Office?
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We should have notarized LLM models for this. Timestamp your LLMs, put them in a notarized database. Then, if you en up in a patent lawsuit, just fire up the relevant LLM, and ask it in simple terms to reproduce troll's claims.
Should it be put on the Blockchain too?
Make sure to use MongoDB which is web scale.
For what purpose? If it's for prior art, the prior at must have been publicly available, so a private LLM wouldn't work. Perhaps I'm missing your point, though.
I think the idea is that if an LLM trained prior to the patent date can reproduce the invention, then either the idea is obvious or there was prior art in the training set; either way the patent is invalid.
> ...if an LLM trained prior to the patent date can reproduce the invention...
Would we even be able to tell if the machine reproduced the invention covered by the claims in the patent?
I (regrettably) have my name on some US software patents. I've read the patents, have intimate knowledge of the software they claim to cover, and see nearly zero relation between the patent and the covered software. If I set a skilled programmer to the task of reproducing the software components that are supposed to be covered by the patents, I guarantee that they'd fail, and fail hard.
Back before I knew about the whole "treble damage thing" (and just how terrible many-to-most software patents are) I read many software patents. I found them to offer no hints to the programmer seeking to reproduce the covered software component or system.
If it can't be reduced to practice, then it's a vanity patent, but also, impossible to violate.
A patent application is a constructive reduction to practice. MPEP 2138.05. https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2138.html#:~:tex...
Indeed, but a constructive reduction to practice means that the inventor still has to describe how it can be done. And if it's impossible, then it's not a reduction to practice, just an invalid patent.
I had similar thoughts before. It's worth thinking about what attorneys will do in response to rejections based on LLMs reproducing ideas. I'm a former patent examiner, and attorneys frequently argue that the examiners showed "hindsight bias" when rejecting claims. The LLM needs to produce the idea without being led too much towards it.
Something like clean-room reverse engineering could be applied. First ask a LLM to describe the problem in a way that avoids disclosing the solution, then ask an independent LLM how that problem could be solved. If LLMs can reliably produce the idea in response to the problem description, that is, after running a LLM 100 times over half show the idea (the fraction here is made up for illustration), the idea's obvious.
Yes that's the idea, and now I'm wondering why I'm being downvoted. Maybe the patent trolls don't like it.
Good idea but poorly stated.
Patent this idea! now! And timestamp it! in an LLM!